The background description provided herein is for generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art or suggestions of the prior art, by inclusion in this section.
MME load balancing and rebalancing functions help direct a User Equipment (UE) in an MME pool area to an appropriate MME in a manner such that the UE to MME connections are evenly distributed among MMEs in the MME pool. In existing network configurations, the MMEs are physical network functions (PNFs) such that the number of MMEs in the MME pool is static and an MME can be overloaded as the number of UEs entering the network keeps rising. Existing MME overload control uses Non-Access Stratum (NAS) signaling to reject NAS requests from UEs, which can cause service degradation to subscribers.